Gulp is cool too, but right now we have some decent amount of technical debt having built LESS compilation and JS minification into NodeBB itself as opposed to using Grunt / Gulp etc. So stay tuned to https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/3543 we'll be trying to cut down on this towards 1.0

I'm trying to figure this out because I'm working on a template system myself. To me, comparing compiled templates to uncompiled ones, it looks like this compilation doesn't really do much at all. Wouldn't a better compilation system compile templates into executable functions?